Betting For a Digitization in Mexico's Restaurants

Monterrey-based Parrot has launched a point-of-sale software for home delivery operation centralization securing US$9.5 million through F-Prime Capital, as demand for eateries’ pickup and delivery services increase, this tool aims to provide tech solutions to digitize Mexico’s restaurants.

“There are a bunch of food tech solutions in Latin American and the US, but it ended up turning the operations […] into a mess. The pandemic was a crazy experience. Not a lot of people knew what would happen, but the downside was that restaurants closed,” said Roberto Cebrián, Co-Founder, Parrot.

ParrotConnect is a software created by Parrot to reverse the operational fragmentation trend posed by the urgency to digitize Mexican restaurants’ operations and services during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This fragmentation, argued Cebrián, was caused when the order process was executed from a delivery app to the restaurant’s point-of-sale (POS) software, costing restaurants that use an average of three delivery apps with 15 different set menus to get 10 to 15 percent of the orders wrong.

Parrot’s tech solution offers a possibility for restaurants to centralize the fragmented operations between delivery apps and their point-of-sale software by creating a managing platform that makes menus, kitchen administration, payments and reports available, starting at US$73 a month when having only one point of sale. 

The company has over 60 employees and a portfolio of over 500 restaurants in Monterrey, Riviera Maya and Mexico City. Its success has allowed Parrot to secure a US$9.5 million investment through F-Prime Capital, totaling US$11.7 million in funding.

“We are heavily investing in the product because we want to give the right experience. The restaurant industry is an old industry and it always finds its way out, so we are happy to be helping them do that with technology. We admire the industry and how creative they are to make things work. Delivery has played a huge part in saving for many restaurants during this time,” said Cebrián.

The Monterrey-based company joins other startups that plan to be the bridge for restaurants between traditional operations and the digitized demands, such as developing POS software Zak, as well as Sunday, a payment system and MarginEdge, a restaurant management tech organization.  

For Chloé Novène, Investment Associate, ALLVP, Parrot is a product of the “Latin America Startup Mafia”, specifically from Uber, as the startup has a “group of former employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies” along with Kurios, Aplazo, Banana Jobs and Perfekto.

“Thinking about Latin America, we asked ourselves about these mafias. Which Latam startup has inspired, trained and invested in their own circle, thereby developing a small ecosystem? We initiated this research with the idea that the emergence of such mafias would likely reflect the growing maturity of the Latin American ecosystem. And actually, it did,” wrote Novène for MBN.